Tom Warren: "While Intel is trying to keep the Windows tree healthy, Microsoft is hoping that the leaves don't start to drop off before its own family of Surface devices are fully ready. Redmond isn't 'priming the pump' here, it's planting seeds for the future. If Microsoft is successful then it could be the world's biggest Windows OEM in just a few years. The future is Surface." You just have to look at the difference in build quality and supplied software between OEM devices and Surface even though Surface is cheaper to realise that the age of Windows OEMs is coming to an end. The writing's on the wall, and the OEMs know it: there's no future for them in Windows.

You are right and I would just add that MSFT is also guilty of killing one of the more interesting form factors along with their good buddy Intel, I'm of course speaking about netbooks. The original netbook ran a Celeron and a small SSD and was very cool, I was lucky enough to get one of the 12 inch AMD netbooks and the E350 means I can play Portal and L4D and even run full Linux VMs on a machine that barely weighs 2.5 pounds and fits under my truck seat, holds 8GB of RAM and oh yeah only costs $350 USD at release. Great unit that purrs even after 3 years.

So what happened? MSFT raised the price of Windows to the OEMs to get rid of the market, Ballmer decided that Windows is "upscale" and shouldn't be sold on cheap devices so it went from $15 for XP Home to $30 for Vista Basic to $45! For Win 7 Basic and you'll notice there is no Win 8 Basic, the lowest tier is rumor has it $65 a copy to OEMs now. And of course Intel managed to get away with another frankly illegal move by killing the Nvidia chipset business and by doing so made the Atom chip completely worthless, as without ION to boost its video performance its a total dog. But of course Intel doesn't want you buying Atom, it wants you to buy Ultrabooks. Ironically thanks to their good buddy MSFT putting out WinME the second coming they have warehouses full of chips because the ultrabooks aren't selling.

So if the board at MSFT don't put down the crack pipe and fire Ballmer I could see the OEMs bailing, after Ballmer announced they were getting into the X86 hardware biz and that his goal is to sell MSFT hardware with MSFT software at MSFT stores (where have I heard this before?/munches on Apple/) they really have no choice, its get away from Windows or die.